Coming into tonight’s contest, the Diamondbacks pitching staff was riding a wave of pretty incredible Home Run prevention. In the first week of September, the entire pitching staff had only allowed 2 HR combined. Since the Trade Deadline, the team’s HR/9 and HR/FB% were easily the best in the Major Leagues. Well, that trend came to a crashing halt tonight. Nabil Crismatt, a dumpster find to replace our original dumpster find when he went on the IL (Anthony DeSclafani), was pitching to an outstanding 2.14 ERA and had allowed a mere 5 ER in his first 4 games started with the Snakes. Tonight, he allowed 2 homers resulting in 4 ER in only 4 innings, his shortest outing of the season. The Home Run regression didn’t stop there, as Tony Disco made his return to the mound and allowed 3 dingers in 3 innings of work.
A total of 5 homers allowed matched our total number allowed since September 27th. Sometimes baseball is very simple. If we’re keeping the ball in the yard, the other team has to string hits together to score runs one at a time. Tonight, the Giants scored runs in bunches thanks to 3 multi-run homers.
The Diamondbacks offense wasn’t a no-show, they were just overrun by the tidal wave of slug coming from the other dugout. We put up 4 runs on Logan Webb, which is a rarity in itself, and we did it within the first 3 innings. A bases loaded triple by Jake McCarthy and a single with RISP by Blaze Alexander put us in a good place, but we just couldn’t string together the hits we needed after the third inning while our pitching staff was getting blasted in the bottom-halves of innings.
It was a regrettable game, but it’s nice to say that this type of game has been a rarity for the team lately. Hopefully the home run bug doesn’t have a long stay with our pitching staff. Watching baseball is a lot more fun when we’re the ones hitting home runs.
Loss Probability and Box Score
An extremely light Monday night GDT with 142 comments at time of publishing. The lack of Recs being handed out was so odd that Sighborg made a comment on it. Normally, I award COTG to the comment with the most Recs, but tonight, since there weren’t any Red Comments, I’m awarding the COTG to ChefAZ for his humorous reply to a thread on the virtues of a feet-first, pop-up slide vs. a headfirst slide:
The Diamondbacks face the Giants in the second game of this NL West series tomorrow with first pitch at 6:45pm Arizona time. Zac Gallen is tasked with being The Stopper and he will be opposed by old friend, left-hander Robbie Ray who is 10-6 with a 3.31 ERA on the year. If we’re going to keep our streak of series wins alive, we’re gonna have to get this one against a pretty tough customer. Go D-Backs!